Sisters On the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  Kevin tightened his lips. ‘‘I’m fine, Bernie. Really.’’

  The cemetery hugged the rear of the parish church. It was a small place, with only one or two mausoleums. Unlike the Doughertys, most Bridgeport dignitaries chose Rosehill, the huge cemetery on the North Side, as their final resting place. Kevin avoided going inside the church; he didn’t want to run into Father Connor.

  Despite the blanket of heat, birds twittered, and a slight breeze stirred an elm that somehow escaped Dutch elm disease. He strolled among the headstones until he reached the third row, second from the left. The epitaph read: HERE LIES A GOOD MAN, FATHER, AND GUARDIAN OF THE LAW.

  Life with Owen Dougherty hadn’t been easy. He was strict, and he rarely smiled, especially after he gave up drinking. But he’d been a fair man. Kevin remembered when he and his buddy Frank smashed their neighbor’s window with a fly ball. Frank got a beating from his father, but Kevin didn’t. His father forked over the money for the window, then made Kevin deliver groceries for six months to pay him back.

  He sat beside his father’s grave, clasped his hands together, and bowed his head. ‘‘What would you do, Dad?’’ Kevin asked. ‘‘This war may be wrong. It took Michael. But I’m a cop. I have a job to do. What should I do?’’

  The birds seemed to stop chirping. Even the traffic along Archer Avenue grew muted as Kevin waited for an answer.

  Tuesday night Kevin and Bernie were assigned to the Amphitheater again. The convention site was quiet, but the rest of the city wasn’t. On Wednesday morning Kevin heard how a group of clergymen showed up at Lincoln Park to pray with the protestors. Despite that, there was violence and tear gas and club swinging, and police cleared the park twice. Afterward, the demonstrators headed south to the Loop and Grant Park. At three a.m. the National Guard came in to relieve the police.

  Greer transferred Bernie and Kevin to Michigan Avenue for the noon-to-midnight. Tension had been mounting since the Democrats defeated their own peace plank. When the protestors in Grant Park heard the news, the American flag near the band shell was lowered to half-mast, which triggered a push by police. When someone raised a red shirt on the flagpole, the police moved in again. A group of youth marshals lined up to try and hold back the two sides, but the police broke through, attacking with clubs, Mace, and tear gas.

  As darkness fell, demonstration leaders put out an order to gather at the downtown Hilton. Protestors poured out of Grant Park onto Lake Shore Drive, trying to cross one of the bridges back to Michigan. The Balbo and Congress bridges were sealed off by guardsmen with machine guns and grenades, but the Jackson Street Bridge was passable. The crowd surged across.

  The heat had lost its edge, and it was a beautiful summer night, the kind of night that begged for a ride in a convertible. When they were teenagers, Kevin’s brother had yearned for their neighbor’s yellow T-Bird. He’d made Kevin walk past their neighbor’s driveway ten times a day with him to ogle it. He never recovered when it was sold to someone from Wisconsin.

  ‘‘Hey, Dougherty. Look alive!’’ Kevin jerked his head up. Bernie’s scowl was so fierce his bushy eyebrows had merged into a straight line. About thirty cops, including Kevin and Bernie, were forming a barricade. Behind the police line were guardsmen with bayonets on their rifles. A wave of kids broke toward them. When the kids reached the cops, they kept pushing. The cops pushed back. Kevin heard pops as canisters of tear gas were released. The kids covered their noses and mouths.

  ‘‘Don’t let them through!’’ Bernie yelled. Kevin could barely hear him above the din. He twisted around. Bernie’s riot stick was poised high above his head. He watched as Bernie swung, heard the thwack as it connected with a solid mass. A young boy in front of them dropped. Bernie raised his club again. Another thwack. The boy fell over sideways, shielding his head with his arms.

  The police line wobbled and broke into knots of cops and kids, each side trying to advance. Kevin caught a whiff of cordite. Had some guardsman fired a rifle? The peppery smell of tear gas thickened the air. His throat was parched, and he could barely catch his breath. He threw on his gas mask, but it felt like a brick. He tore it off and let it dangle by the strap around his neck. Around him were screams, grunts, curses. An ambulance wailed as it raced down Congress. Its flashing lights punctuated the dark with theatrical, strobe-like bursts.

  Somehow Kevin and Bernie became separated, and a young girl suddenly appeared in front of Kevin. She was wearing a white fluffy blouse and jeans, and her hair was tied back with a bandana. She looked like Maggie. Young people streamed past, but she lingered as if she had all the time in the world. She stared at him, challenging him with her eyes. Then she slowly held up two fingers in a V sign.

  Kevin swallowed. A copper he didn’t know jabbed her with his club. ‘‘You! Get back! Go back home to your parents!’’

  She stumbled forward and lost her balance. Kevin caught her and helped her up. She wiped her hands on her jeans, her eyes darting from the other cop to Kevin. She didn’t seem to be hurt. She disappeared back into the crowd. Kevin was relieved.

  A few yards away a group of cops and kids were shoving and shouting at each other. Rocks flew through the air.

  ‘‘Traitors!’’ An angry voice that sounded like Bernie rose above the melee. His outburst was followed by more pops. As the tear gas canisters burst, a chorus of screams rose. The protestors tried to scatter, but they were surrounded by cops and guardsmen, and there was nowhere to go. The cops closed in and began making arrests.

  Coughing from the gas, Kevin moved in. He was only a few feet away when the girl with the long hair and peasant blouse appeared again. This time she was accompanied by a slender boy with glasses. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans. The girl’s bandana was wet and was tied around her nose and mouth. She was carrying a poster of a yellow sunflower with the words WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS.

  The boy looked Kevin over. He and the girl exchanged nods. ‘‘What are you doing, copper man?’’ His eyes looked glassy.

  Kevin kept his mouth shut.

  ‘‘You don’t want this blood on your hands. She told me how you helped her up. Come with us. You can, you know.’’ The boy held out his hand as if he expected Kevin to take it.

  Wisps of tear gas hovered over the sidewalk. Kevin tightened his grip on his club. He stared at the kids. The girl looked more and more like Maggie.

  Suddenly, Bernie’s voice came at them from behind. ‘‘Kevin. No! Don’t even look at ’em!’’

  Kevin looked away.

  ‘‘Don’t listen to him, man!’’ The boy’s voice rose above Bernie’s. ‘‘You’re not one of the pigs. You don’t agree with this war, I can tell. Come with us.’’

  Kevin looked down.

  ‘‘Get back, you little creep!’’ Bernie moved to Kevin’s side and hoisted his club.

  The boy stood his ground. ‘‘You know you don’t belong with’’—he waved a hand—‘‘him.’’

  A commander in a white shirt at the edge of the barricade yelled through a megaphone, ‘‘Clear the streets. Do you hear me, men? Clear the streets. Now!’’

  Someone else shouted, ‘‘All right. Grab your gear. Let’s go!’’

  A line of police pressed forward, but the boy and girl remained where they were. Everything fell away except the sound of the boy’s voice. In an odd way it felt as silent as the cemetery behind the church.

  ‘‘Time’s running out, man,’’ the boy said, his hand half covering his mouth. ‘‘How can you defend the law when you know it’s wrong?’’

  Bernie’s voice slammed into them like a hard fist. ‘‘Kev, don’t let him talk to you like that.’’

  Kevin spun around. Bernie’s face was purple with rage. Brandishing his riot stick, he swung it down at the boy’s head. The boy jumped, but the club dealt a glancing blow to his temple. The boy collapsed.

  ‘‘Bernie, no!’’ Kevin seized Bernie’s arm.

  Bernie snatched his arm away. ‘‘Do yo
ur job, Dougherty.’’ He pointed to the kids with his club. ‘‘They are the enemy!’’

  The girl turned to Kevin with a desperate cry. ‘‘Make him stop!’’

  Kevin strained to see her face in the semidark. ‘‘Go. Now. Get lost!’’

  ‘‘No! Help me get him up!’’ She knelt beside the boy.

  ‘‘What are you waiting for, Dougherty?’’ Bernie’s voice shot out, raw and brutal. He clubbed the boy again. The boy lay curled on his side on the ground, moaning. Blood gushed from his head. His glasses were smashed.

  ‘‘Do something!’’ the girl screamed at Kevin. ‘‘Please!’’

  Her anguish seemed to throw Bernie into a frenzy. His eyes were slits of fury. He raised his stick over his head.

  Kevin froze. Everything slowed down. Images of Maggie floated through his mind. She could be in the crowd. Maybe Father Connor. Even his mother. He thought about Mike. And his father. What Bernie was doing. What his duty was. His duty was to serve and protect.

  The moment of clarity came so sharply it hurt. His chest tightened, and his hands clenched into fists. For the first time—maybe in his entire twenty-three years—he knew what that duty meant.

  ‘‘Dougherty.’’ Bernie kept at him, his voice raspy. ‘‘Either you do it, or I will!’’

  Kevin stared at his partner. Then he dropped his club and threw himself over the girl. She groaned as his weight knocked the wind out of her. Her body folded up beneath him, but it didn’t matter: she was safe. Kevin twisted around and caught a glimpse of Bernie. His riot stick was still raised high above his head.

  Kevin wondered what his partner would do now. He hoped the whole world was watching.

  I Killed

  by Nancy Pickard

  When the second man sat down, the green metal park bench groaned and sank into the dirt. He took the left side, leaving a polite foot and a half between his arthritic, spreading hips and the wide hips of the man leaning on the armrest on the other side of the bench.

  They glanced at each other. Nodded heavily, like two old bulls acknowledging one another’s right to be there. Then they turned their beefy faces back to the view. Each man inhaled deeply, as if his worn-out senses could still detect the burnt-grass, baked-dirt scent of autumn.

  They both wore baggy gym suits that looked as if nobody had ever run in them.

  Behind them stretched an expanse of golden grass, and then the elegance of Fifty-fifth Street. On the opposite side of Fifty-fifth, the big windows of large, well-maintained houses looked out over the same beautiful vista the two men faced. In front of them, there was a cement path, then trees, then the golden-green, rolling acreage of Jacob L. Loose Park. If they’d hoisted their aching bodies up, and limped to the right, they’d have come to a pond where swans paddled in bad-tempered glory all summer, but which Canada geese owned now that it was late November. If they’d hobbled left, instead, they’d have come to tennis courts, wading pool, rose garden, playground. Mansions and high-rise, high-priced condos ringed the big park in the middle of Kansas City, Missouri. To the north was a private school, then the Country Club Plaza shopping center; to the south were the neighborhoods of Brookside, Waldo, and a short drive to the suburbs.

  It was a tranquil, wealthy, civilized scene in the heart of the city.

  The man on the right side of the bench said, in a voice made gravelly from time and the cigars he no longer smoked, ‘‘You come here often?’’

  After a long moment, as if he hadn’t much liked being spoken to and was considering ignoring it, the second man said, ‘‘No.’’

  His voice sounded as if he, too, had been a heavy smoker in his day.

  ‘‘I do.’’ The first man coughed, deep, racking, phlegmy. ‘‘I come here every day.’’ When he was finished hacking, he said, without apologizing for the spasm, ‘‘This bench, every afternoon, regular as clockwork.’’

  ‘‘That right.’’ His bench companion looked away, sounding bored.

  ‘‘Yes, it is. You know the history of this park?’’

  ‘‘History?’’ Now the second man looked where the first man was pointing him, with a finger that looked like a fat, manicured sausage. He saw a black cannon, a pyramid of cannonballs, and what looked like a semicircle of signs for tourists. ‘‘No, I don’t know it.’’

  And don’t care to, his tone implied.

  ‘‘This was the scene of the last big Missouri battle in the Civil War. October twenty-third, 1864. The Feds had chased the Rebs all across the state from Saint Louis, but the Rebs kept getting away. Finally, they took a stand here. Right here, in this spot. Picture it. It was cold, not like today. They were tired, hungry. There was a Confederate general right here, where that big old tree is. It’s still called the General’s Tree. His graycoats were standing here, cannons facing across the green. Then the bluecoats suddenly came charging up over that rise, horses on the run, sabers glinting, guns blazing.’’

  He paused, but there was no response.

  ‘‘Thirty thousand men in the battle that day.’’

  Again, he paused, and again there was no response.

  ‘‘There was a mass grave dug afterwards, only a few blocks west of here.’’

  Finally, the second man said, ‘‘That right?’’

  A corner of the historian’s mouth quirked up. ‘‘Mass graves always get people’s attention. Saddam would still be alive without ’em. You just can’t kill too many people without somebody noticing.’’

  ‘‘Who won?’’

  ‘‘Feds, of course. Battle of Westport.’’ Abruptly, he changed the subject. ‘‘So what’d you do?’’

  ‘‘What did I do?’’

  The question rumbled out like thunder from a kettledrum.

  ‘‘Yeah. Before you got here to this park bench. I’m assuming you’re retired. You look around my age. You’ll pardon my saying so, but we both got that look of being twenty years older than maybe we are. And not to mention, you’re sitting here in the middle of a weekday afternoon, like me.’’

  ‘‘Almost.’’

  ‘‘Almost what? My age, or retired?’’

  ‘‘Both, probably.’’

  ‘‘I figured. You always think so long before you speak?’’

  There was a moment’s silence which seemed to confirm it, and then, ‘‘Sometimes.’’

  ‘‘Well, retire quick, is my advice. I was a salesman.’’

  The other man finally looked over at him, but skeptically. A slight breeze picked up a few strands of his thin hair, dyed black, and waved it around like insect antennae before releasing it to fall back onto his pale skull again.

  ‘‘You weren’t,’’ he said, flatly.

  ‘‘Yeah, I was. I don’t look it, I know. You expect somebody smooth looking, somebody in a nice suit, not some fat goombah in a baby blue nylon gym suit. Baby blue. My daughter picked it out. Appearances are deceiving. I don’t go to any gym, either. But ask anybody who knows me, they’ll tell you, I was a salesman.’’

  ‘‘If you say so.’’

  ‘‘I do say so. So what were you? In your working days?’’

  Instead of answering, his park bench companion smiled for the first time, a crooked arrangement at one corner of his mouth. ‘‘Were you good at selling stuff?’’

  ‘‘You look like you think that’s funny. It’s serious, the sales business, and supporting your family. Serious stuff. Yeah, I was good. How about you?’’

  ‘‘I killed.’’

  ‘‘No kidding. Doing what?’’

  The other man placed his left arm over the back of the park bench. His big chest rose and fell as he inhaled, then exhaled, through his large, pockmarked nose. ‘‘Let me think how to put this,’’ he said, finally, in his rumbling voice. ‘‘I never know what to tell people. You’d think I’d have an answer by now.’’ He was silent for a few moments. ‘‘Okay. I was a performance artist, you might say.’’

  ‘‘Really. I’m not sure what that is. Comedian?’’

&n
bsp; ‘‘Sometimes.’’

  ‘‘No kidding! Where’d you appear?’’

  ‘‘Anywhere they paid me.’’

  ‘‘Ha. I know how that is. Would I have heard of you?’’

  ‘‘You might. I hope not.’’

  ‘‘You didn’t want to be famous?’’

  ‘‘Hell no.’’ For the first time, the answer came fast. ‘‘That’s the last thing I’d ever want.’’

  ‘‘But—’’

  ‘‘Fame can be . . . confining.’’

  ‘‘I get you.’’ The first man nodded, his big, fleshy face looking sage. ‘‘Paparazzi, and all that. Can’t go anyplace without having flashbulbs go off in your face.’’

  ‘‘I hate cameras of any kind. Don’t want none of them around, no.’’

  ‘‘Imagine if reporters had been here that day . . .’’

  ‘‘What day?’’

  ‘‘The Battle of Westport.’’

  ‘‘Oh.’’

  ‘‘Embedded with the troops, like in Iraq. Interviews with the generals. Shots of the wounded. What a mess.’’

  ‘‘And no TVs to show it on.’’

  The first man let out a laugh, a booming ha. ‘‘That’s right.’’

  His companion took them back to their other topic, as if he’d warmed up to it. ‘‘Lotsa people with lotsa money aren’t famous. You’d be surprised. They’re rich as Bill Gates, and nobody’s ever heard of them.’’

  ‘‘I wouldn’t be so surprised.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, probably not. You look like a wise guy.’’

  ‘‘You wouldn’t think I was so wise, not if you’d ask my son.’’

  ‘‘What’s the matter with him?’’ The second man was talking faster now, now that he was asking questions, instead of answering them. They were getting into a rhythm, a pace, a patter. ‘‘He think you’re an idiot?’’

  ‘‘He says I’m a fool, ought to mind my own business.’’

  ‘‘But you retired from that, didn’t you?’’

  ‘‘From what?’’